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The kilometre—with the accent on the ki and the re ending—is a unit of distance. A kilometer—with the accent on the lo and the er ending—would be a device that measures kilos, like perhaps a bathroom scale? centimetre, millimetre, speedometer, altimeter.
I'm actually fairly forgiving about people saying it the wrong way, but when Siri gives me GPS directions, it really grinds my gears. She should know better!
Kilo is just a prefix meaning thousand. Your bathroom scale doesn't measure kilos it measures grams in sets of 1000.
Well technically it measures newtons but I digress
Ooh, I sense the presence of another hill! The vernacular use of "kilo" as short for "kilogram" must stop?
I love that in the US media, you only ever hear about kilos in the context of drug seizures. Those evil drug lords poisoning the youth with bastardized metric jargon…
No I use kilo all the time as shorthand for kilogram. Context usually does the work.
It makes sense. But as a US speaker it just makes me want to stick to my guns and generalize our second syllable stress on these units. I'm team kilogram now. And centimeter.
Found a new hill!
Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I did hear an American say altimeter once? I suppose if you were consistent in reversing all the rules, it could be chalked up to a dialect variation? I'll let it go in that case. :)
I think you're looking for "scale" and "miles", you heathen. 😉
The measuring device would be kill'o'meter.
Oh yeah! I still have one of those from the days when our son still lived with us and started crypto mining on my dime.